As covered in a previous post, I’ve been tinkering with a Python
implementation of the fledgling Gotalk. Since this has been fun to play with,
I figured it’d be worth sharing where python-gotalk is, and what has happened
with it in the last two weeks.

Upstream gotalk progress

Rasmus has created a new protocol v1 branch in the Gotalk repo, where all of
the new hotness is landing. A few hilights:

Request IDs have grown from three bytes to four in response to requests for
more potential permutations.

A new ProtocolError message type was added. This is sent when a peer doesn’t
understand the protocol version specified by the sender. While I haven’t
seen any specifics on how potential downgrades may work, this could
conceivably be used to handle that in the future (maybe?). It is not clear
if gotalk is striving for any kinds of backwards compatibility between
protocol versions, so that’ll be something to watch.

The Go and JS example client/servers have progressed quite a bit.

python-gotalk updates

At this point in time, we should be current with the gotalk v1 branch wire
format (as of the night of Feb 6). I haven’t started on any socket/state
tracking stuff, and probably won’t until v1 is mostly solidified.

However, I’ve thought about keeping python-gotalk focused on just the message
marshalling/unmarshalling. The socket/state tracking code will differ quite
a bit depending on whether you are using Twisted, asyncio, Tornado, etc. It’d
also mean that python-gotalk could avoid all external dependencies.

I am pleased (and somewhat embarrassed) to release python-fedex 1.1.0!
Pleased in that these changes have been patiently waiting for PyPi for a few
years now, embarrassed in that I’ve let the project sit since I stopped
using it more than five years ago. Let’s re-visit ...

A recent HackerNews post announced Gotalk, a simple bidirectional protocol.
I can imagine your collective eyeballs rolling. "Oh great, yet another
half-baked way for… things to talk to one other". But keep following along,
maybe you’ll see something you like. Here are some highlights:

python-colormath was started
back in 2008, when I was an undergraduate at Clemson University (Go Tigers!).
While there are a good number of people out there making use of the module
effectively, there were a lot of things I wanted to do differently in an
eventual 2.0 release. There ...

For the last four years, my blog has been powered by Django. As I have found
myself becoming more and more busy, I have stopped wanting to hassle with
keeping things up to date on the server and the application.

After brief visits with Puppet and Chef for config management,
I’ve set my sights on Ansible. It’s late and I’ve been staring at
this stuff for way too long today, but here are some early observations: